Here are the hoaxes of the newspapers on the Pnrr revised by the government
How and why big newspapers, oppositions and regions are wrong about the new Pnrr of the Meloni government. The deepening of Giuseppe Liturri
The one that has just ended has been a week full of events on the Pnrr front.
On Tuesday and Wednesday – between parliamentary halls and newspapers that slavishly relaunched slogans devoid of any factual reference – we abundantly crossed the boundaries of reality with a deluge of lies, inaccuracies, incorrect interpretations which however, precisely because of their obsessive repetition, seem to have earned the rank of truth. To the point of recalling the famous aphorism "Repeat a lie, a hundred, a thousand, a million times and it will become a truth" attributed to the Nazi hierarch Joseph Goebbels to describe the debate – described as "surreal" by Minister Raffaele Fitto on Tuesday in the Chamber – in progress on the revision of the PNRR.
So let's try to restore a minimum of order, strictly adhering to the facts and documents. On Tuesday Fitto concluded the first phase of an operation that had been underway for months, aimed at understanding what had remained unscathed after the passage of the steamroller on the PNRR consisting of unprecedented inflation in the last forty years and the first real checks of the Commission on the quantitative objectives of the plan.
The outcome – already anticipated at the beginning of June with the third report to the Chambers and defined with the revision proposal presented on 27 July – is that 144 objectives and targets need to be revised out of the 346 that remain from the fifth to the tenth installment. Nothing particularly new, since the June report had already identified 118 projects on the verge of revision or rejection. These changes are added to those relating to the fourth installment (10 out of 27 objectives) which the Commission has already approved last Friday and for which the implementing decision of the Ecofin Council is now awaited within 4 weeks.
Fitto's proposal merely took note of the experience gained in the seven long months that the Commission employed for the (preliminary!) assessment of the achievement of the objectives of the third installment. That experience forced everyone to acknowledge that carrying out the plan sketched out by the Conte 2 government and perfected and then sent to Brussels by the Draghi government would have led us to lose a significant portion of the available funds. Therefore, the minister acted preventively, because after 31 August and until 2026 the Commission would have dropped the ax. Anyone who talks about "cuts" today guiltily overlooks the fact that those projects were, in fact, cut by EU rules, not by Fitto. If the sieve is very tightly meshed, it is certainly not Fitto's fault who took note of it and prevented even worthy projects from ending up getting stuck in those meshes.
It is also overlooked that for the 16 billion projects that the PNRR no longer finances, there will be around 19 that enter the new chapter (RepowerUE) dedicated to energy efficiency and security. No one was able to contradict Fitto when he meticulously listed the characteristics of the " poisoned wells " – mentioned by the honorable Alberto Bagnai in the courtroom – present in the PNRR: around 50 billion projects prior to February 2021, some of which do not comply the conditions subsequently set by the Regulation; investments that do not respect the principle of not causing damage to the environment; projects with thousands of implementing subjects whose administrative load cannot be managed in a reasonable time; works whose costs have exploded and whose start-up times will not allow reporting by 2026. Fitto recalled the story of the Integrated Urban Plans, also relating to the stadiums of Florence and Venice. They were among the 25 (out of 55) objectives of the third installment that the Draghi government considered achieved, complete with ministerial decrees already issued in April 2022 to allocate funds to the 31 selected projects, including stadiums. It is a pity that the Commission – which however knew, because it could not have failed to have followed that process – only realized in 2023, during the verification phase, that those projects did not comply with the conditions of the Regulation. Did anyone seriously think that the government and the whole country was willing to simmer like this for every semester until 2026? Even regardless of the criticality of the definanced projects, the principle of maximum effectiveness and marginal return on investments applies. And after the energy crisis that has hit Italy since autumn 2021, someone believes, remaining serious, that it is better to finance the Roccacannuccia cycle path rather than strengthen the energy networks and provide incentives for companies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels in favor of renewable ones?
Instead zero debate. Because the clamor of the newspapers hastened to amplify three lines that the Research Service of the Chamber dedicated to the need to indicate the new sources of funding for projects no longer included in the PNRR. Here too, it would have been enough to read a few lines further to learn that there is an indication of the new funding sources (cohesion fund, European structural funds and supplementary fund), but it is obviously general, as it is normal for this stadium.
The reaction of the Regions is also surprising, as reported by Fatto Quotidiano on Thursday, referring to a letter that the conference of governors sent to Minister Fitto to request an urgent meeting to discuss the revision of the PNRR. It is surprising because the Study Service of the Chamber reports no less than 13 meetings held by the control room for the PNRR between November 2022 and the end of July 2023 to, among other things, " identify and prepare the proposals for updates, modifications and remodeling of the Plan , starting from the drafting of the Italian chapter of REPowerEU, also through the presence at the meetings of the Control Rooms of the Regions, ANCI and UPI, as well as the main public investee companies ”. We don't think they talked about the transfer market. So one might think – also in the light of the observations in the letter – that the governors do not agree with Fitto's choices, which is obviously legitimate, and have paid little attention to the explanations also provided to the Chamber. Because the delay in the advancement of investments is not the only criterion used to exclude them from the funds of the PNRR. What would have been the point of concluding a project in time if it would have crashed against failure to comply with one of the many conditions set by the Regulation (see the fate of the states of Florence and Venice)? Which seems to be the same fate that would have met the "tourist cycle routes" which, although in an advanced state of implementation, Fitto has excluded, not to injure someone, but to save them from the Commission's injuries. If the problem of the Regions is that of keeping close to the Cohesion Funds (from which Fitto would like to draw to finance what is excluded from the PNRR) then it is good to say it clearly and not to use other arguments instrumentally.
Equally surreal is the government's alleged setback in the fight against tax evasion. The goal is to reduce the propensity to evade (ratio between taxes evaded and potential revenue) measured in 2019 (18.5%) by 5% and 15% in 2023 and 2024 respectively, when we should reach 15.7 %. Mind you that this does not mean reducing tax evasion by 15%, as has been sloppily written. In fact, the potential revenue present in the denominator of the relationship is also an estimated datum subject to variation and therefore likely to influence the relationship itself. In any case, it is a "lunar" target if we consider that despite all the efforts on that front, it took four years to drop from 21.4% in 2015 to 18.5% in 2019. Between 2022 and 2023 , with the scars of the lockdown and the energy crisis on his skin, Fitto limits himself to acknowledging that the default rate of Italian companies has almost quintupled and is a figure beyond the government's control. It is therefore reasonable to expect a slower decline in that ratio and it is therefore advisable to recalibrate the objective. Or is it better to crash into the obstacle like irresponsible?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/ecco-le-bufale-dei-giornaloni-sul-pnrr-rivisto-dal-governo/ on Sat, 05 Aug 2023 18:42:08 +0000.